Get back...

...to where I once belonged, part 4.
Liverpool's calling.  I know a visit to my hometown is a tad overdue when a mere crossword puzzle clue can make me feel a little bit homesick.  See ya tomorrow old city.
Get back JoJo.

Now that's a cover crop!

Why plant silly (and potentially harmful) mustard as a cover crop when you could sow every other row in the vineyard with California poppies (Eschscholzia Californica)?  Whilst poppies don't have the biomass of a legume, for instance, they do have a large taproot which could help condition the vineyard soil somewhat.  Besides, they just look gorgeous.

A penny for your thoughts.

It's getting close to my annual trip home to Blighty.  I'm getting excited.  To help me get in an English state of mind, Vinomaker recently included Halfpenny Green Vineyard's, 2009 Penny Red in a blind tasting he put together for me.  The Penny Red is a blend of Pinot noir (okay), Dornfelder (who?), Triomphe D'Alsace (what?), and Rondo (why?).
I was given this bottle of wine by Monkey who had procured it for himself at some country fayre and then decided that I should have it.  Now I've had a fair amount of English white wines, including a few sparkling wines and even a rosé, which on the whole have been rather decent.  I just can't remember ever having an English red wine before.  Here are my tasting notes; 
OMG!  Nose - hot dust, spice and oak.  Floral, perfume, green beans.  Thin, tart with a little berry - acid nice.  Variety???
Draw your own conclusions, but just let me add this: there's no place like home.

Fish on Friday...

...and it's not even Lent.
Yes, I bought this bottle of wine because I liked the shape of the bottle.  I'm so shallow!  But hang on a minute, the $10 I forked over for this bottle of Pescevino was well worth it.  Well, it was worth it after the initial sulphurous-blitzkrieg blew off - then it was a perfectly quaffable glass of white table wine and wasn't in the least bit pesky.  A blend of 60% Verdicchio del Castelli di Jesi Classico, 30% Trebbiano delle Marche and 10% Chardonnay, this uncomplicated fish-juice paired quite well with my shrimp-fettuccine dinner.
I may be shallow, but I'm not a snob.

BottleRock.

Napa is hosting it's first ever music festival this weekend.  BottleRock billed as "the biggest thing to hit Napa since the grape" is being held at the Napa Expo (fairgrounds).  In addition to good, old rock'n'roll there will also be a smattering of comedy acts performing and lots of wine thrown in - it is Napa after all.  It is estimated that 35,000 people will attend the festival on peak days, so there has been a fair amount of grumbling from local residents and merchants who fear that navigating the east side of the city will nigh be impossible.  I am a little concerned myself about being able to get my grocery shopping and errands done over the next few days, as I have to cross that area to get into town.
At $599 for a four day pass the cost of admission was seen as a bit steep for many locals, especially younger folks who one would think would be the demographic that the organisers would have targeted.  (To their credit, the organisers getting wind of this perceived blunder hot-footed it over to the college at the beginning of the week and donated 200 free tickets to the students.)  Further, from what I hear, not a lot of people recognise many of the bands that will be appearing.  I had a quick gander over the list of featured artists and had heard of only a few;  Jane's Addiction, The Black Crowes, Joan Jett, and Blues Traveler.  Oh, and Dwight Yoakam..."who?" said Vinomaker.
I do like their logo though.

Fight or flight.

Today was not a particularly good day in Vinoland.  We had quite a bit of rain this afternoon - so that's the most recent application of sulphur washed off.  Drat!  And my day began with the sight of two deer parading around the vineyard, munching on the Pinot grigio and Cabernet Sauvignon shoots - the shoots that I had painstakingly spent all weekend stuffing up under the trellis wires.  Double drat!  The panicked, young buck repeatedly rammed the deer-fence in an attempt to escape and was looking a little worse for wear by the time he finally exited through the main gate, which Vinomaker had opened for that purpose.  It was a most upsetting day.

A single short-stemmed grape flower.

Ta-dah!  Of course, there are other flower clusters in the Pinot grigio vines that have a lot more bloom going on (and in the Orange Muscat).  I just thought this lonesome flower looked like it was in a rather jubilant mood and not in the least, well, lonely.
It was overcast and sprinkled for about 30 seconds this morning which, along with the low 70s temps, was a pleasant change to the low 90s we have been having.  A very enjoyable afternoon was spent suckering the Cabernet Sauvignon vines.  But no more rain now, thank you very much, we're flowering.

Afternoon in the Vineyards: 2013.

Today was the 13th annual Afternoon in the Vineyards, a casual meet-and-greet event sponsored by the Napa Valley Vintners that allows Napa Valley residents to get up close and personal with their friendly, neighbourhood viticulturist/vintner.
Vinomaker and I decided to pop over to Ackerman Family Vineyards which is a stone's throw, well, maybe two stones and two throws, from Vinoland.  The past couple of days I have been busy suckering vines, so this was to be a pleasant diversion.  It was a glorious day, maybe perhaps a little too warm to be stomping around a dusty vineyard other than my own little corner of Eden, but I always enjoy visiting new vineyards...besides there are usually wines to be sampled.
The Ackerman family have a very nice vineyard which is planted to modified-lyre, head trained, cane pruned (the tour guide's description, not mine) Cabernet Sauvignon vines and is certified organic (don't get me started).  A lot of rescue horses (the horse-stall barn was very fancy).  And a nice location with extensive Coombsville vistas.  Unfortunately, the two vintages of their Cabernet Sauvignon that I tried, the 2007 and 2008, both wonderful vintages for Napa in general, were not to my liking.  Both wines displayed stewed-fruit characteristics which, given the relatively cool climate in Coombsville, I can only attribute to something amiss in the winemaking department, perhaps.  But then, what do I know?  I just know they weren't to my taste...beautiful property though.

Pooey-Fuissé.

I have been having fun trying some older vintages lately, but it's been hit or miss.  Older wines can be great, or really bad.
This 1959 bottle of Domaine Burrier Pouilly-Fuissé, from the cellar of Vinomaker's father, will remain unopened.  I have no desire to ingest this wine; the volume of the bottle has decreased by about a third over the last 54 years, the wine is very brown, and it scares me a little.  The capsule has really deteriorated and the cork resembles something that one would find growing on a dank forest floor.  This bottle is best left alone.  The Burrier family are still working their Burgundian magic on Chardonnay to this day, but even if this wine was a more current vintage I'd still be reluctant to try it.  I'd take a stripped down Chablis any day over the oakiness of the Mâconnais.

Nothing runs like a...cake?

Now, that's what I call a cake!
Keeping up with my family's love affair - on both sides of the Atlantic - with all things John Deere, it is only fitting that my Nephew OTW's birthday cake is a fetching-confection of John Deere green.  With yellow trim, of course.
Happy 2nd birthday little one, Auntie Vinogirl loves you very much.

Hyacinth Bucket.

Just when I thought I had exhausted all the blueish-coloured wildflowers in Vinoland I stumbled across a new one, literally.  Really more purple than blue, the bouquet-like flower head of this Wild Hyacinth (Brodiaea pulchella) seems to float in midair due to the fact it is held aloft on a skinny, foot high stalk.  Heading uphill, with my head down, I nearly missed it.  I'm glad I didn't, it's cute.
I am a little confused as to the true binomial name of this plant as I have also seen it referred to online as Dichelostemma capitatum and apparently the species has been moved from family Liliaceae to family Themidaceae.  This little hyacinth is also known by another common name, Blue dicks, but I'm not going to be using that particular epithet anytime soon.  Whatever this wild flower is called, it is still pretty and very welcome in Vinoland.

Say the bells of St. Clement's.

Oranges and lemons?  Just lemons.  Lemon curd to be exact.  This St. Clement, 1983 Sauvignon blanc (SB) is the oldest Napa Valley SB that I have ever had.  Actually, this is the oldest SB from anywhere that I've ever had.
A small diversion today, from our usual routines, saw my co-workers and I taking a few minutes to taste this senior SB that had exited our employer's personal wine library.  Initially what began with the group cracking jokes, mainly about the deep honey-amber colour of the wine, turned quite serious when the still viable cork was eased out of the bottle and we finally quietened down enough to taste the stuff. 
Almost 30 years old, this aging SB had the aromas of honey and hazelnuts, with a shy-hint of apricots.  On the palate the wine showed surprisingly good structure, with a fetching acidity, more nuts, more apricots and the aforementioned lemon curd on the finish.  There was the merest, and I mean tiny, tiny, suggestion of acetaldehyde, but one would expect that with a three decades old white wine.  No residue of any kind around the punt and at only 12.5% alcohol, my fellow tasters and I laughed no more.  Now, whilst I wouldn't want to drink a butt load (technical term) of this wine, as after all it didn't have the bright vivacity of a young SB, it was nevertheless a beautiful wine.  A delightful experience.
The Marketing Queen, tasting along with us, pointed out to the group that there was no government warning label back in those days, and sure enough, the back of the bottle was indeed nekkid.  My goodness, how did we manage to survive in an era when there was no mandatory, official foreboding-verbiage to save us from ourselves?  Ho-hum!

Happy St. George's Day, 2013.

Horatio Nelson once said, "England expects that every man will do his duty."  Vinogirl expects every Englishman, and woman, to do their duty today and drink a glass of wine in celebration of our patron saint.
Happy St. George's Day to my family, friends, and anyone who loves England as much as I do.

An old vine Zinfandel.

The phrase 'old vine' appears quite often on California wine labels.  Old vines have a reputation for making better quality wines due to the concentration of all of the vines resources into fewer clusters of fruit.  But anyone who knows just a little about viticulture and oenology knows that this is a gross over-simplification, as there are a multitude of factors that together determine the eventual quality of a given wine, the least of which is the subjective experience of the individual taster.  In the United States there is no formal definition of exactly what constitutes an old vine.  Is it 30, 40, 50 years before the vines in a vineyard are deemed old?  All grapevines begin to produce less crop after 20 years and in the Napa Valley, for instance, 20 years can be pretty ancient for a vineyard.
The Rosenblum Cellars, 1991 Michael Marston Vineyard Zinfandel does not mention old vines on the front label, but on the back label it says: "These vines are over 85 years old...They produce a crop of less than one ton to the acre, but the fruit is spectacular in its intensity."  All well and good, but harvesting less than one ton of grapes per acre is not really viable from an economic standpoint, is it?  Wineries need to make a profit or they simply cannot continue making wine.  As a side note,   The Marston family no longer farm these low-yielding Zinfandel vines in their Spring Mountain vineyard (Spring Mountain became an AVA in 1993), they have replanted every block to Cabernet Sauvignon.
I didn't have high expectations for this wine, after all it was almost 22 years old.  Yes, I know, in the grand scheme of things this wine might not seem old when compared to some wine producing areas of the world - I'm thinking Bordeaux - however, this was a California Zinfandel and I personally don't think Zinfandels age particularly well.  Neither Vinomaker or I are quite sure how we acquired this wine, which can often be the case in Vinoland, but that makes trying older wines all the more fun, one never really knows what the wine will be like.  The tasting notes on the back label describe the wine thus; "...rich brambly blackberry and briary spicy elements in the bouquet with flavors of blackberry jam, spice and anise."  And I could very nearly agree with these descriptors if it wasn't for the fact that this wine had been thoroughly spoiled by brettanomyces.  Now, I usually have a higher tolerance for a touch of brett in wine, I am not as sensitive to this spoilage as Vinomaker is.  On this occasion my olfactory epithelium must have been working overtime because after three sips of this veritable mouse-bottom of a wine, I was done. However, Vinomaker didn't think it was that bad.  No biggie...brett happens!

Wide eyed and lungless.

This little fellow is a Yellow-eyed Ensatina (Ensatina eschscholtzii xanthoptica), more commonly known as a lungless salamander.  Now and again I'll find an ensatina hanging out by my compost bin, but they are more commonly spotted at the back of the vineyard, behind the barn, living happily under some old planks of wood or logs.  Because they breath through their skin they really shouldn't be handled, so this particular photo shoot was executed carefully and quickly.  Then the ensatina was placed back exactly where he/she was found.  Fascinating little creature.